More of All the Good Stuff

Yes, I have too many bananas.

I stuck some banana and plantain trees in the yard. The plantains don’t do all that well, probably because I am too lazy to go buy horse manure. The bananas do well enough to cause me problems. I don’t know what to do with them.

Today I’m baking banana nut bread, to see if I can make it good enough for the Trinity church cafe. I started with the same old stale recipe everyone thinks their grandma invented. I added allspice, and I jacked up the other spices. I also used Mike’s secret ingredient to make the cake moister and tastier. And I substituted brown sugar for white.

I think it should be very good. I’ll know pretty soon. After that, I have to figure out what to put on top of it.

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The banana nut bread is pretty amazing. The added spices woke it up, and Mike’s mystery ingredient improved the texture a great deal. The outer crust is a little chewy now, and the whole thing is moist.

Photos:

This is good enough for church. I can double the salt and maybe make the loaves smaller, so there’s more crust, but other than that, it’s ready.

I’ll have to figure out a topping.

What will I do if people get hooked and the banana trees crap out?

Problem for another day.

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Oh, man. This stuff is too good. I may have to throw it out in self-defense.

Thanks for the recipe, Lord. Now save me from it.

The Internet Rocks

I found free horse manure on Craigslist! Am I wrong to be happy about this?

This has to be the ultimate win/win transaction.

My House Needs Fiber

I had a moment of clarity last night, unfortunately. It can be very relaxing to be wrong and not know it, so it’s always upsetting when I get an epiphany.

I had the TV on because one of the birds was out of the cage, and I happened to see a show called “Hoarders.” It’s about people who fill their houses with junk, until the rats take over and the kids have to sleep on piles of boxes.

The show bugged me. I’m not a true hoarder, but I’m related to one, and I have lots of hobbies, and I’m absent-minded. Put it all together, and you end up with a person with lots of junk, who puts stuff down in the wrong places and forgets it’s there for weeks or months. Hoarding Lite.

I got up and started relocating things. I had a pile of books and gun parts by my bed. I made room in a closet and stored it. I took tool-related items off the dining room table and put them in the garage. I threw out a number of stupid and worthless items.

Of course, I will need all of those items very badly today. That’s how decluttering works. As soon as the garbage truck drives away, you need whatever is in it.

I hate clutter. It’s like living in a little dirty crevice. It probably raises your blood pressure. But I have a clutter-prone personality. It’s like Felix and Oscar are in my head, duking it out like Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

I have a feeling that the Holy Spirit reduces clutter. Hear me out. When you’re not living for God, you do stupid things with your time and money. You will wander down fruitless paths, involving yourself in futile pursuits. That’s because only God can guide you in the direction you’re supposed to take. Result? You end up with stuff you weren’t supposed to have. Not just stuff, but time obligations. For example, you may give up church because your talented kid has sports practice every day, or simply because you want to squander time watching football on TV. You might end up devoting three hours a night to drinking beer. You may find yourself at a strip bar three times a week, blowing your money.

When God takes over, your priorities and desires change with time. Suddenly, you don’t need an entire closet for your porn collection. Or, like me, you may want to get rid of your delicious Cuban cigars. You find yourself selling things and giving things away. Life becomes more streamlined. You start discarding the things Paul referred to as “dung” so you can make room for the pearl of great price.

I still have a rolling toolbox full of gun stuff by the dining table, and a lot of my canning supplies are sitting on it. I have to move that to the garage. I have to throw out or give away some of the garage objects I will never need. I think it’s safe to throw out my old PC cabinet, and I need to Craigslist my brewing kegs.

I really need to get rid of the Super Genie Lift I inherited from one of my dad’s tenants. A guy at my church said they’ll take it, but it may be ten years before they get around to coming for it.

One of the reasons I don’t like Miami is that there is no space here. I’d like to have a home with an outbuilding for my hobbies. Here, that would run maybe three million dollars. A hundred miles north, maybe two hundred and fifty thousand. Cities are for limited people. If your only hobbies are TV and clubbing, Miami is perfect for you. Add three hobbies, and you’re out of luck. You need to move and get more room.

Last night I thought about my grandfather’s house in Kentucky. It had five bedrooms, including a little spare bedroom that held some of his guns and my grandmother’s sewing stuff. It had a big kitchen, a full dining room, a full living room, a big den, a second den in the basement, a second kitchen in the basement, tons of extra basement square footage, a big foyer, and three baths. It also had a tool shed and a barn, plus a carport and a concrete patio.

Mind you, this was not a mansion. It was just a nice red brick home. It brought $120,000 when the heirs sold it.

THAT is living. Bring your tools. Bring your cooking equipment. Buy three smokers. Get four gun safes. Get a bass boat and an RV and five motorcycles. No problem!

My idea of an ideal home is a three-bedroom CBS house with a big commercial-style kitchen, terrazzo floors, and no curtains, with nothing on the walls except maybe NRA calendars. Put a 1500-square-foot building out back with lots of room for musical instruments, tools, and storage. Give me two acres or more to grow food. I’m done. Let me live there until I die. You would have to hold me at gunpoint to get me to leave that house to go to paradise.

Forget antiques. Forget rugs; they hold dirt and stains and smells. Forget hardwood. It rots, termites eat it, and it makes noise. Put a drain in the kitchen floor so I can spill things. Tile the kitchen walls all the way to the ceiling. Get me white dishes and cups from a restaurant supply house, and put in a deck oven for pizza. Kill every plant that isn’t grass or something that produces food. Give me an entire room for Maynard and Marvin. That’s luxury!

The “stronghold” concept is well known among Christians. Satan has spiritual strongholds we have to conquer. The Canaanite cities Joshua destroyed are symbolic of these strongholds. Addictions and bad habits are strongholds. Bad attitudes are strongholds. A physical illness or poverty may be a stronghold. We’re supposed to break these things down by spiritual warfare.

It has occurred to me that God has strongholds, too. Every human believer is described as a house or a temple or an embassy. We belong to the nation of heaven, even though we live on earth. Within us–within our “walls”–God’s ways prevail. And we have to strive to keep Satan out, and we pray in the Spirit to build ourselves up, so there is something stronger than Satan within us, to repel attackers.

Similarly, a Christian’s home can be a stronghold. It can be an embassy of God. That’s what I want. I know life isn’t supposed to be a breeze, but we’re supposed to live in victory, and it seems to me that within our homes, Satan should be relatively powerless. A stronghold home should be a place where a Christian can retreat and recharge. We have to fight the enemy everywhere else. At home, we should have more peace.

A home should be like a military garrison. You defend it and keep it free from invaders, and from time to time, you make excursions into enemy territory and do damage. Then you retreat back to the garrison and prepare for your next assault.

This is what I want. I don’t want fancy furniture or snooty neighbors or a location shallow people would crave. I want a fortress where I can find a little relief.

Before the clutter show, I say a show called American Pickers, about two guys who go around talking old people into selling them valuable antiques below the market price. They went to visit a man who had twelve buildings full of junk. They had a hard time persuading him to sell them anything. He had to be 75 years old, and this stuff was falling apart, but time after time, they would show him a rusty object and ask the price, and he would tell them it wasn’t for sale. It seemed to me that this guy was in the same boat as the hoarders. He’s going to die, and all that neglected, decaying stuff will be loaded up in dumptrucks and destroyed so the new owners will be able to use the buildings. Crazy.

I also caught a few minutes of a show called Intervention. You can probably guess what that’s about. I plan to record it from now own. It’s helpful to see how tough professional addiction counselors are. It reminded me of an important truth: if you don’t fix a loved one who has an addiction–if you withdraw and wait for them to change, and it doesn’t happen–it doesn’t mean you didn’t try to help. It means the addict didn’t try. Every bad thing that happens to an addict as the result of not trying is the addict’s fault. If someone asks you why you’re not helping, say, “Shouldn’t you be asking why the addict isn’t trying?” Don’t fall for blame-shifting. If you accept even the smallest particle of blame, you might as well be handing the addict a bottle of pills.

It’s funny how I happened to tune in to three very instructive shows, on a night when I was just trying to find entertainment while I communed with my pets. Dang these “coincidences.” They are swarming on me.

Woe to Thee, O Land, When Thy King is a Child

Are we finally reaching the point where gravity catches up with us and we have to admit we can’t finance the future by eating it?

The Dow is down over eighty points, and we just had two days that were even worse. Sooner or later, before we can have a real recovery, somebody somewhere has to make some money–has to create some wealth–and given our unemployment figures, that doesn’t seem to be happening. And we still have a gigantic glut of foreclosed homes the banks are sitting on. They can’t hold them forever. Eventually, they’re going to be put on the market or bulldozed. It will be interesting to see what happens to home loans and property values.

Because we borrowed an astronomical amount of money to finance the recovery, in the future, we have to make more money than usual in order to have the same prosperity we had in the past. It’s just like a student loan; you borrow money when you’re 20, and by the time you pay it off, every pizza you ate in college cost $50. What happens when you graduate with debt and then can’t get a job? That’s America’s situation.

Where is the evidence that we’re going to do better in 2015 than we did in 2005? Why would anyone think that was possible, let alone likely? And if we try to solve the problem by inflating the currency, we’ll just end up with larger numbers of smaller dollars. We’ll all be millionaires, and nobody will have a second pair of shoes. It’s still poverty, no matter how you look at it. We may be able to cheat the Chinese via inflation, but we’ll also be burning our cash reserves.

I don’t know why God provided me with silver coins, but it looks like I should be happy about it. I inherited a bunch of circulated silver coins from my grandfather. He snapped them up after Johnson turned our money into steel slugs. Seemed crazy at the time, but if we have a depression, I’ll be able to buy bread.

People think silver coins are worthless. They’re ignorant. The coins are 90% silver.

I just looked it up. My nickels are worth a dollar each. The dimes are worth over a dollar. The quarters are worth over three dollars. Wish I had enough of them to keep me alive for a year or two. Maybe I should buy some.

Gold is fine, but in a depression, it would be hard to spend. Owning gold would be like carrying thousand-dollar bills. A piece the size of a sesame seed would buy a dozen eggs. That’s useless. They don’t make coins that small. And what are you going to do, if you own it? Run a smelter in your kitchen? Forget it. Even if you could cut your gold into small pieces, no one would trust it. This is why mints exist. The purpose of a mint isn’t to make coins. It’s to make coins people can trust. Otherwise, private enterprises would be making gold coins diluted with copper and brass.

A silver coin, unlike a gold coin, will have a useful value. One of my dimes is worth a dozen eggs. Spending gold will be very difficult, but handing over a dime and grabbing a dozen eggs will be simple. Gold will only be useful if you’re buying a car or real estate. Or you’ll be able to trade it for silver, at a loss.

People say you don’t have to have precious metal in your possession in order to use it. You can trade it electronically. Good luck with that. If things get weird, I don’t want my money in the vault of some metals dealer three thousand miles away, waiting for him to declare bankruptcy and disappear. Savings accounts are insured by the government. Gold? No. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can have private insurance, but would you trust it? Look at AIG. And the insurance wouldn’t compensate you in gold. You’d get worthless paper dollars. Better to stuff a few bags of silver in a deposit box at a local bank. If the bank fails, money will vanish, but goods in deposit boxes will remain.

If Obama and the Fed manage to eat our savings by printing money, what will we have left? Subsistence agriculture and bread lines. People in cities will starve. It may be especially bad in Florida, where we are suffering an unprecedented wave of blights and exotic pests. Oranges are probably going to get very scarce over the next five years because citrus greening is incurable. We may lose our bananas. Growing tomatoes here is already very hard; without chemicals, it can’t be done.

What do you do when you live in Miami and times get hard? The fish and peacocks and ducks would disappear in two months. Squirrels and pigeons would follow. You can’t grow enough fruit to live on, if you have a typical lot. It’s hard to grow vegetables here, and most lots are small anyway. Many homes here have topsoil six inches deep. Under that, it’s pure coral.

I never pray for God to fix things for us. Not exactly. I pray that we will turn to him and submit to him because of our problems, and that he’ll give us recovery only after that happens. We won’t learn anything from an unconditional handout. It would be a false kindness, and God doesn’t deal in those. I actually pray he will maintain the recession until we have revival. Otherwise, the suffering will be in vain. I also ask that he end the recession for those who have turned to him already.

Obama thinks a chicken can make a living by eating its own eggs. Everything he tells us goes against common sense, history, and basic economics. Borrowing only leads to prosperity when you reasonably anticipate that the borrowed money will enable you to make enough money to repay it. Otherwise, the result is bankruptcy. Can a nation declare bankruptcy? I guess so, but it won’t protect us from harsh consequences. We may weasel out of our debts by devaluing the currency, but we’ll all become poorer, and we’ll have to pay higher interest to China the next time they lend to us. This is how bad credit works. Everything costs more. But it’s worth it, so we can have essential government services, such as the subsidy of multimillion-dollar studies to tell us why trout can’t fly.

I think we’re going to have labor pains for a while. Things will get better and then worse, over and over, until the big collapse comes. The fluctuations will warn people and help those who are teachable to make preparations. Hopefully I’ll be ready. Life isn’t perfect when you’re in good standing with God, but it’s a whole lot better.

Global Warming Apparently Comes in Spurts

WE’RE HAVING A HEAT WAVE! IT’S 58 DEGREES OUTSIDE! LET’S ALL GO SKINNY-DIPPING! FINALLY THE AGONY IS OVER! IT’S GOING TO BE 74 DEGREES TODAY! AND THEN TOMORROW NIGHT, IT’S GOING TO BE A WARM AND TOASTY 34!

WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!

Thirty-FOUR? FAHRENHEIT? Did I wake up in Minnesota?

I have to check Weather Underground again. This can’t be right.

It is right! And we’re going to have an eighty-percent chance of precipitation! I’M BUYING A SLED!

I guess Al Gore doesn’t have to worry about being tarred and feathered while it’s too cold to pour the tar.

I can’t recall a single winter when we had weather like this. It sounds like it’s going to be snowing in Orlando. I am so tired of wearing long pants and real shoes INDOORS because the central air can’t cope with anything lower than fifty-five degrees.

Maybe this would be a good day to get another space heater. Surely Home Depot has restocked after the initial terror.

Will this kill any of the bugs or animals that have been driving us nuts? It’s too late to help the citrus.

Thank God I’m getting over this disease. I am desperate to attend my weekly prayer group again. Tomorrow I’ll put on my liberal-mortifying George Bush Carhartt chore coat and drive up to Denny’s to see the other guys.

Oh, man. I have like thirty grapefruit ripening. I may have to freeze ten gallons of juice. My bananas! I have to pick the bananas!

At least we’re having a real winter. It’s kind of a bummer when you go a whole winter with no good sleep weather.

I’ll enjoy this warm and muggy day while it lasts.

Falling Faster Than Support for Global Warming Hoax

It’s under 50 degrees. Wow. For Miami, on a sunny day, that’s freakish. All over Florida, ill-designed central heating systems are failing at their jobs. People are wearing bizarre cold-weather ensembles that look weird because Miamians don’t know how to put the look together. I guarantee you, if you drive around Miami this morning, you will see at least one person wearing a wool hat, a heavy coat, and shorts.

I wouldn’t mind the cold weather at all, but for the fact that I’m recovering from a viral illness, and one of the symptoms is a low body temperature. Every night I pile on three blankets and crank the heated mattress pad up. Last night, it was merely adequate.

I’m one of the few people who has witnessed snow in Miami. When I was in high school, we had a really nasty day, and while I was standing in what we called “the quadrangle” (a yard surrounded by school buildings), I looked up and saw a few flakes in the air. I guess everything is okay as long as that doesn’t happen again.

I talked to Mike this week, and he predicted dead iguanas would be flopping out of trees. I guess that will happen. And some of our fish will float up to the surface of canals.

I wonder if the pythons will suffer. We have loads of them out in the filthy bug-infested ugly swamp majestic Everglades. They come from India and Burma. I don’t know how cold it gets there.

There are worries about the citrus crop. I don’t know if there is any point in trying to save Florida citrus. There is a new disease out there, and many people think it will end Florida citrus (maybe all commercial citrus growing) permanently, or at least until resistant trees are developed. It’s called Citrus Greening. A bug from Asia bites your tree, and that’s the end of it. I have several trees that aren’t doing well. I’m going to have to kill them. Limes and grapefruit seem to be immune, but everything else is looking bad.

I don’t know what to plant to replace the citrus. Mameys are okay. Mangoes are a reliable standby.

Citrus is in trouble, and there is a banana blight out there somewhere. I don’t think it has hit Florida yet, but experts fear it will wipe bananas out. They’re all descended from the same ancestor, and they don’t have enough genetic diversity to develop resistance. Supposedly.

Imagine not being able to order orange juice in a restaurant. Some people think that day is coming. They think orange juice will only be available in small quantities, as a mixer. I think we’ll have resistant trees. But until they show up, we’ll have problems.

I can’t believe the diseases and bugs we have here. You can’t have a tomato plant. You can barely grow peppers. Beans get rust. The Jamaican Tall coconut palms are long gone. The banyan trees and ficus hedges are dying. If it weren’t for poison, no one in South Florida could keep the ants and roaches at bay; cleanliness doesn’t do the job. Now we’re losing our citrus. In a couple of years, we’ll be eating MREs.

Why can’t the diseases hit fruit nobody cares about? I wouldn’t miss Surinam cherries. They’re disgusting. Guavas are very overrated. Papayas smell like dog poo. Loquats…a lot of people don’t even know what a loquat is. I’ve only eaten about eight longans over the course of my life. Sea grapes are pretty useless. The dates here don’t get ripe because of the climate. Take that stuff. Leave the tangelos.

I don’t know what to do with my papaya trees. They’re big, and they produce, but the fruit smells like dog excrement. It seems like you can avoid the smell by picking them early, but that practice hasn’t proved reliable.

Time to move to southern Tennessee. That’s the ticket. Tomatoes grow just fine there. Corn. Potatoes. Apples. Tasty pigs.

I’ll bet yankees are going to the beach today. This is one of the funnier things about living in Florida. People who spend money on vacations are so determined to get what they paid for, they’ll subject themselves to incredible suffering. They go to the beach when it’s 50 degrees. They go fishing in six-foot seas. They literally blister themselves on their first day here, and then THEY GO BACK AND LIE IN THE SUN THE NEXT DAY. That’s so horrible, I don’t even like typing it. Have you ever seen sun poisoning? It’s painful just to be near it.

When it comes to traditional South Florida pursuits, I’m no fan of the cold. If the water is under 80 degrees, I have no interest in swimming. If the air is below 72 degrees, count me out of the fishing trip. Cool weather is great for yard work and barbecue, but you won’t see me near the water.

If you’ve never had a pool thermometer, you probably don’t know how cold 75-degree water is. It sounds pleasant, because 75-degree air is pleasant. But it’s pretty cold. Water has to be much warmer than air to have the same feel. I’ve seen canal water hit 94 degrees here.

One of the interesting things about cold snaps is that they’re the only times we have cold running water. The rest of the year, we have hot and warm. The cold water tap comes out at about 80. It does a very poor job of cooling beer when you’re homebrewing.

If we ever had ice, there would be bodies all over the streets. Miamians can barely drive when it’s dry and clear. They are the least skilled drivers outside of Asia. Italian driving philosophy combined with Chinese ability and Somali judgment. If there was anything to slide on, the feds would have to bring refrigerated trucks in to hold the dead.

When I was a kid, we had a place in North Carolina. A lot of people from Miami have invaded that area. They make people crazy, because they can’t drive on hills. They have no idea what low gears are for. They ride their brakes until they give out. They creep along in terror, with long lines of better drivers behind them. I learned to drive in Kentucky, so I don’t have the local disease. I still remember my mother cursing at them.

I would never want another place in North Carolina. The whole point is to get away from Miamians, and they’re already there. It’s like the scene in Alien where Ripley finds out the creature stowed away with her on the shuttle. It’s not fair! Go be rude and loud somewhere else! If I wanted to see your Lord of the Flies kids running around screaming in restaurants while you yell into your cell phones and pretend not to notice, I would have stayed home!

Maybe it’s time to cut back on caffeine again.

“Quiet” Tool-Obsessed Neighbor Amassed Arsenal of Lethal Peppers

I decided to torture my virus with more hot food. I hit the store and got ingredients for doro wat. The plan was to make it even hotter than the curry I made a few days ago. I picked four habanero golds plus one big Trinidad Scorpion to season it.

Now I have the stew bubbling on the stove, but it seems like the virus just went away. My head opened up, and I feel much better. Maybe it was the fumes from the burning onions, toasting spices, and minced peppers. Or maybe I’m really cured.

I have to ask myself: do I still want to eat this stuff if I’m not sick?

Of course I do. Let’s not kid ourselves.

I’m planning to make rotis instead of injera. I can’t help it. Rotis are better. And I bought sour cream to wrap up in there with the doro wat.

Tomorrow I may have something that makes a virus seem pleasant.

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Ohhh…that was amazing. My brain actually melted and ran down my throat. I can’t say I miss it. I haven’t used it since 1996.

Take my word for it. Rotis are ten times better than injera. Dump a big pile of doro wat on one, make sure there’s a boiled egg in there somewhere, add a big blog of sour cream, fold it up like a burrito, and GO.

Can’t Get a Permit for a Moat

I bought some elephant tur…”concrete buttons” today. These are the round concrete domes people put on their lawns to discourage drivers from using the grass as a highway. For a long time, the only name I knew for these objects referred to elephant droppings, and then I heard “berm,” and now I find that the people who sell them call them “concrete buttons,” so I am relieved to know the generally accepted term.

Some character who drives in this area early in the morning–almost certainly a newspaper delivery person–has been deliberately running over and moving my only elephant…my only concrete button. The yard is getting pretty torn up. This seems like a poor way to stimulate newspaper sales. He’s in for a surprise.

I considered getting buttons with holes in the middle and hammering rebar into the ground through them, with a little bit sticking up from the top of the buttons. This would make the buttons immovable and hole tires pretty quickly. But the object is not to cause damage. It’s to discourage idiocy. If the perpetrator doesn’t see the rebar, he’ll hit it, and then the deterrent will have failed. After that, there will be no hope of peace or change, and the newspaper guy and I will be like Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.

It’s wonderful having a truck. In the past I would have had to borrow my dad’s ancient SUV and put the buttons in the back, making a mess. Today I backed the Death Star up to a gate, and a forklift pulled up and held the entire box of buttons over the truck bed while a guy unloaded them for me. Nice.

I spend time in prayer and study early every morning, and today I thought about the first psalm. It says we are to “meditate on the law day and night.” My assumption has been that as a Spirit-filled believer, I was to interpret this as an instruction to pray in the Spirit during the day. There are strong hints about this, which I am too lazy to repeat now. We believe the law, handed down at the first Shavuot, has been supplemented and to some extent superseded by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which was handed down at Pentecost (Greek name for Shavuot) after the crucifixion.

I think I missed part of the picture. The great thing about the post-Pentecost era is that we get to mingle our strength with the unlimited power of the Spirit, and while the latter is unquestionably the big-ticket item, the former is important. So I think it’s important for Christians to meditate on (which means “repeat internally”) the scriptures during the day, especially during time that is otherwise idle. I have a rule, which I observe poorly: never wait. When you find yourself delayed for some reason, find something useful to do. This fills that time very productively.

Because God is a thoughtful planner, I am fairly well prepared for this. For a long time, I’ve been memorizing psalms. I keep losing bits of them, but I have a pretty substantial mental library built up. The psalms are no joke. Jesus and the Apostles used them all the time, as did Satan when he tempted Jesus. They have power. Memorized scripture is the sword of the Spirit. It’s a weapon. It worked for Jesus. So it’s not like I’m just armed with meaningless poetry.

I’ve been making an effort to think on memorized psalms when my time is free, and it’s wonderful. It brings peace, and it reminds me of the power that is at work on my behalf. Very nice. It also helps me not to forget the things I’ve memorized. I recommend it. I’m not suggesting you have to do this in order to be a good Christian, but it appears to work.

I can never remember to do anything I purpose to do, so I asked for grace to be able to make myself do this, and so far, it’s working. I feel much better and more inclined to trust God. If you try this, or if you do it already, let me know what you think.

I learned something yesterday. I love watching Robert Morris, because I think God is telling him fantastic stuff about Spirit-filled living, but I think he may be wrong about something. He says he believes the Holy Spirit “owns” the spiritual gifts, and that any believer can exercise any gift. I’m sure this is true, to the extent that God can do whatever he wants with any believer (or with donkey or a rock or a stick) at any time, but I think we are wrong to believe that generally, the gifts are universal. Robert Morris seems to teach that if you have one gift, you have them all, all the time.

I thought he was right, simply because so much of the rest of his teaching was right on target, but I now think he’s wrong.

Here’s a bit from 1 Corinthians 12:

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.

Here is more:

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

You can look at the first passage and say that it doesn’t expressly rule out the Morris interpretation. The fact that God gives different gifts to different believers at various times doesn’t mean those believers can’t operate in all of the other gifts at other times. But why would Paul write the second passage, if different believers did not have different gifts, generally? There would be no reason to write the passage. Why would one believer think himself better or worse than another, with regard to the gifts, if he had exactly what everyone else had?

If you read 1 Corinthians, you will see more evidence that his interpretation is shaky. I am too lazy to quote all of it.

Not a big deal, but worth noting.

Mr. Kalashnikov’s Latest Must-Have

Last night I finally got to work on my Saiga 12 conversion.

For those of you who are behind the Bible-and-gun-clinging curve, the Saiga 12 is an AK-47 12-gauge shotgun. It’s magical. Low recoil, a clip instead of a tubular magazine [someone tell me the right name for "clip" and I'll put it in, but "magazine" obviously doesn't work], and AK reliability and simplicity, plus you can get one for 500 bucks. Hmm…way over a thousand for a Gucci semiauto that holds fewer rounds and has a lame tubular magazine, or $500 for an AK that shoots buckshot? Real hard choice there.

For reasons too boring to go into, the government makes the Russians put a bunch of pansy parts on the Saiga, in order to make it resemble a sporting gun. Picture yourself hunting ducks with this thing. Insane. As soon as you buy one, you’re supposed to buy other parts to make it work properly. You move the trigger forward, add a pistol grip, and get rid of the silly Elmer-Fudd-style buttstock. You can also get magazines holding up to 12 rounds, but for some reason, the 8-round jobs are favored.

You have to drill out rivets and mill off unneeded tabs and so on. I got my parts a long time ago, but I didn’t have machine tools, so I put off doing the conversion. Last night I decided to attack.

The milling machine made the work a lot less nerve-wracking. I got the rivets out without damaging the gun. Putting the new fire control group (“trigger and stuff”) in the gun was a horror. The Tapco parts I ordered did not come with instructions, so there was a lot of painful trial and error. My fingers are sore today, but I got the parts in there. I still have to add everything up and make sure the result is legal.

Now the trigger spring needs to be bent. Kalashnikovs come with strange springs made of twisted wires, and they’re sloppily made. The one I have isn’t bent correctly. It didn’t matter with the old parts, but the new parts don’t like it. Only one arm of the spring is doing anything, so there isn’t much pressure on the trigger, which means it can release the hammer with very little provocation. As a result, when you cock the gun, it doesn’t stay cocked. The hammer falls when the bolt goes forward. I would guess that if I tried to shoot it, the result would be rapid fire, followed by hilarity with the range officers and the power-mad goons fine public servants at the BATF.

I wanted to ship the gun to a smith who does conversions, but thanks to Obama, they are backed up until the year 3000.

The finish on this gun is horrible. It’s a crinkly black coating which flakes off when you look at it hard. And the area that used to be covered by the old trigger guard is bare. I’m going to have to put something on it. I’ll take a look and see if the professionals are still backed up. If not, I’ll send it off. If I can’t do that, I’ll have to use one of the coatings they sell for home use. That will require blasting the parts. What a pain. On the up side, the sight of me doing this in the front yard will have a positive effect on the attitudes of my neighbors.

In the meantime, I guess I can cover the bare areas with Super Blue.

I still have to mill some stuff off. It makes me nervous, putting the gun in my machining vise. I put wooden shims beside it and paper towels under it. Seems to work.

It looks like the Jacobs chuck I got on Ebay, trying to save money, is a piece of junk. With a small drill bit, the runout nearly exceeds the bit’s diameter. With a large bit, the chuck keeps falling off the arbor. I don’t think the arbor is the problem. I can indicate it and see. My used Albrecht chuck is perfect; I just assumed a Jacobs chuck that looked good in photos would be okay. Wrong.

My father is all interested in Martin County, which is up the coast a ways. He wants a waterfront place. I would much prefer inland. I want land around me when cling to my reactionary paraphernalia and grow food and can beans. A waterfront house on half an acre costs more than a mansion–that term is no exaggeration–on five or ten acres farther inland.

The older I get, the less boating does for me. It’s a lot of work. The boat always has mechanical problems which I have to fix (or fail to fix after hours in the sweaty, greasy bilge). I invariably get sunburned. I can’t get my friends to learn to do things for themselves, like tying knots and rigging baits, and they often show up hung over. Also, Miami boaters are even ruder than Miami landlubbers, which is saying a great deal. They make fishing unpleasant. My dad enjoys it tremendously, though, so that makes it worthwhile for me. It appears that it will negatively affect our choice of properties, however.

Given the giant differential between waterfront and inland real estate prices, coupled with the collapse of the Florida real estate market, I suppose there is no reason why I couldn’t get some land of my own, not too far from our compound. That would mean paying for additional razor wire and land mines. And of course, a second pair of Rottweilers trained to eat Jehovah’s Witnesses, Omaha Steaks representatives, and mimes. And burglars and murderers, I guess, although they don’t disturb me nearly as much.

Have you seen the Omaha Steaks people? Them and the other food truck guys? It’s very sad. The companies that sell this dubious food convince them to blow their savings on refrigerated pickups full of things no one wants, and here is their sales secret: knock on the door, start backing up toward your truck, and say you want to show the mark something. If you want to freak one out, don’t budge. The natural human instinct is to follow someone who says he wants to show you something. If you don’t move, it ruins the pitch.

You never see those guys twice. I guess they all go out of business. It’s awful to con someone into investing in a business you know is almost certain to fail. Especially when it involves sales, which is full of psychic trauma to begin with.

If I were going north by myself, I’d be looking at northern Georgia and southern Tennessee. I love Eastern Kentucky, but it’s a depressing place. People just don’t do well there; it’s as if the land rejects them. And the corruption, racism, and unnecessary ignorance wear me down. It’s bad enough that I have to hear the word “nigger” in rap music pouring out of car windows. I don’t need to hear it from people I know, in my own living room. One of the great things about charismatic churches in the South is that they’re destroying racism. It would be nice to live in an area where charismatics are big.

Some areas of Appalachia are more blessed than others; that’s the simple truth. Maybe I could find one. I keep thinking about the area around Chattanooga. Check this property out: CLICK. How about that? Room for a garden! It also has a basement for MACHINE TOOLS. The price is $265,000, so call it 250. Down here, that gets you a 2-bedroom shed in Little Havana with a Cuban-style paved yard. And this house is in an area full of holy rollers, so I’ll fit right in. “The Lord told me I needed a surface grinder and a Barrett .50-caliber rifle.” “You TOO?” “I got a couple I’m trying to sell.” “My mom is believing for a new AR-15.”

Somebody I believe to be honest and in touch with God claims the US is headed for a famine. He says this has been revealed to him. I wonder if it’s true. So many Christians are bugging out.

I can’t relate to the desire to be in a big flashy town. I have always been disgusted and bored by social climbing, and I cook so well, I have little enthusiasm for restaurants. Cultural offerings tend to be pretty sordid these days. I don’t go to movies or concerts. I have never had any inclination to support a sports team associated with a city; I find the concept perverse and tiresome. There is a kind of shallowness associated with a desire to be in big, well-known cities. I would rather live among nice people, with a little ground around me. Hopefully God will see fit to find the right place for me.

I Feel Like an Old Person Under Obama’s Health Plan

It is 71.8 degrees outside. This is the greatest day of my life. Nearly. It’s supposed to be about 61° at ten p.m.

When you let your yard go to hell, hot weather is okay. When you actually care about maintaining your home, it’s another story. It’s very tough working outdoors in Miami in the months of June through October. Your sunglasses fill with sweat so you can’t see. You have to apply sunblock once an hour. The sweat makes the sunblock run into your eyes. This is why we have illegal immigrants; to them, the suffering is worth it.

I may go out and poison the yard today. It needs weed killer, fertilizer, and imidacloprid. The clouds of buzzing whiteflies are getting hard to see through. Something needs to be done.

I took a look at my plantains this morning. People told me my trees wouldn’t produce in Miami. I don’t know where they got that idea. My French Horn plantain tree seems to be more productive than my bananas. I can’t even guess what I’ll do with a long bunch of one-pound fruit, but I’m glad I’m getting them.

Now that it’s cool enough to do things, it’s hard to decide what to start with.

Maybe the best thing is to think it over while eating pie.

Okay, no pie.

Tires!

Here’s a snippet from an email from someone I know who travels around and meets a lot of Christians:

I’m north of Atlanta and I also met 4 ladies yesterday here in GA.
Again – Guns and God and preparation! And it’s not just talk now.
People are doing it. Amazing.

What on earth is going on? People aren’t conspiring to make this happen. It’s not deceitful, contrived, Obama-style Astroturfing perpetrated by professional liars. This is the real thing.

Yesterday my dad started talking seriously about moving north. A long time ago, I told him I was considering moving out of this seedy and unpleasant county, and he said he thought that was a great idea, so instead of looking for a relatively small place for me to buy, we started looking at a bigger place for him to buy. A compound! Now the plan is back on the table.

We’ll need razor wire. Motion sensors. Rottweilers. Soap cannons and deodorant mines to repel hippies. I have shopping to do.

I’m going to see if we can get out of Miami in the near future and look at some properties. There is nothing here for me. Most of my friends have left town. I no longer have an office. My only important connection is my church, and I could move eighty miles north of here and still be able to attend. Or I could find a new church.

I would absolutely love to move to south Tennessee or northern Georgia. I could never get my dad to do that, however, and I think he needs to have family nearby, so I can’t very well do it without him.

I stuck new tires on the truck today. Very nice. I could swear they ride smoother and more quietly, but that could be my imagination. They seem to track better. The old ones seemed to make the truck ramble around a little. Now I’m prepared for SHTF driving.

They didn’t charge me sales tax. Can’t figure that out. Maybe today is a tax holiday.

For a couple of years, Perry Stone has been predicting heavy-duty economic problems for the US. He doesn’t claim to know the day when it will hit, but he thinks food will be scarce. Back in 2008, he said he thought people who owned their homes outright would be better off than everyone else. I guess that’s always true.

I’m going to start canning sausage, and I have to think about other stuff that would be good to have around if the power went off. You can always buy prepackaged food, but why not have things you actually enjoy? Shuck beans! Pickled beans! Dried apples! Country ham! Live better on your survival rations than you do when you use stores.

What else do I need? Maybe another crate of ammunition for the K31. Unbelievably, I can buy GP11 locally.

I keep thinking a nuclear blast or WMD attack on US soil is on the way. The Fort Hood incident proves we are not doing enough to thwart Muslim kooks. We’re spending lots of money, but a huge percentage of it is wasted harassing harmless non-Muslims for the sake of political correctness. If an Army doctor can place calls to Al Qaeda and repeatedly announce his anti-American sentiments without even getting reprimanded, Muslims can bring an atomic bomb into New York harbor. Sooner or later, we’re going to reap the harvest of self-hatred and empty liberal grandstanding. We’ll turn on our televisions and see a smoking ruin that used to be the New York Stock Exchange or the US Capitol. Then the real recession will start, and the only people who will get through it without eating their pets and drinking from puddles will be the Bible clingers and home-schoolers out in the woods.

When people who should know better do unbelievably stupid things over and over, it means there is a spiritual cause. I believe that. I believe this is what caused the real estate collapse. A monkey could have seen it coming, yet brilliant investors and financiers could not. Now the people who are supposed to protect us are clamoring about a nonexistent anti-Muslim backlash instead of screaming about our failure to take action against domestic terrorists. Media “experts” are moaning about Nidal Hasan’s imagined “pre-post-traumatic stress syndrome” when they should be noting his Muslim fanaticism. When people behave this stupidly, the supernatural is at work. Our guard is being taken down by occult forces so we will be open to an attack a sane America would have prevented as a matter of course.

This shows how weak the flesh is when God is against you. We think we can take care of ourselves, but without his protection, we are as stupid as lemmings.

I hope I’m not here when things really start popping. I want to be at least a hundred miles away, with my shelves loaded with tasty home-canned grub and my Saiga 12 loaded with law-enforcement-only buckshot.

I Can Wear Long Pants

Cold weather is coming. I’m excited beyond words.

By “cold,” I mean below 80°. That’s sufficient as far as I’m concerned. It means I’ll be able to go outside for more than three minutes without worrying about my shirt sticking to me when I come back inside.

We had a hot September and August. Al Gore would be thrilled. Now we’re getting weather in the lower 80s, and it actually feels cool.

Yesterday I was able to load manure in the truck and put it on the fruit trees. I could have done this in the summer, but heat, broiling sunshine, streaming sweat, and airborne manure and fertilizer were not a combination I wanted to face. I put manure, fertilizer, epsom salt, and Ironite on the mangoes, bananas, plantains, and some of the other trees. I replaced my dying impatiens with new victims and manured the flowerbed. I feel like these were major accomplishments.

We are told to do stuff like this as though we were doing it for God himself. Arrgh. Okay! Okay! I’ll do it. But…arrgh.

I didn’t fully understand how high my truck’s bed was until yesterday. I had to stack big bags of manure in it, and the tailgate was at chest height. That’s not very convenient. I looked around on the web, and I found that some people lower their beds. Evidently, you don’t need to have your bed way up in the air unless you’re towing. Futhermore, I would guess that Dodge makes the bed higher than it has to be, for the strange people who jack their trucks as high as possible.

I don’t understand the truck-raising fad. It makes a truck less safe to drive, and it makes it hard to get in and out. It makes the bed hard to use. If you don’t use the bed, why get a truck? I think you have to be out of your mind to get a truck and then modify it so you can’t use the bed. Talk about expensive and totally useless fashion accessories. It makes a $10,000 Chanel suit seem like a good buy. If your truck is primarily a toy, and you like customizing it like a Harley, more power to you. I just want to be able to use mine. I already have a Harley. From a functional standpoint, it’s pathetic and useless. The footboards drag when I turn. I don’t need any more silliness in my life.

I don’t know anything about four-wheeling, but I have seen people claim that raising a truck makes it more suitable for going off-road. Is that really true? The ground clearance doesn’t change at all. The axles don’t rise with the truck. You can add axle height by using ridiculous oversize tires which don’t really work with your suspension. I don’t know why I’d want to do that. It effectively lowers the final drive ratio, and the tires are expensive, and it looks stupid.

When I was a kid, I rode in what I thought was the ultimate off-road vehicle. It was a dune buggy made with VW Beetle parts. This thing would go places a truck or Jeep could never go. It was just a cage with two seats. Two-wheel drive. You could go straight up the side of a hill with it. You could drive it straight into a curb a foot high and barely feel the bump when you went over it. Wonderful vehicle. I think if I had a desire to drive around in the dirt, I’d get something like that instead of ruining an expensive truck and getting inferior performance.

My truck has four spacers in it that raise the bed. You can take them out from between the rear springs and axle and put them above the springs. This drops the bed over an inch. I may do that. It’s reversible. It would be great to have the bed three or four inches lower, if there’s a cheap way to do it without causing problems when there’s a load on the springs.

People who lower their trucks get a lot of ridicule from people who raise theirs. Common sense has a way of drawing hostility from those who lack it. I would have to be demented to take this gigantic truck out in the mud and try to use it as an all-terrain vehicle. It will never happen. It would be like using an ocean liner to go bass fishing. I am never going to have to worry about rocks hitting the underside of the body. Might as well bring the bed down where I can use it.

When I was working on the truck, installing Nerf bars and a rear-view camera, I was amazed at how easy it was. I could lie on the ground under the truck and reach up without bending my arms much. The T-bird, on the other hand, was so low I couldn’t get a low-profile jack under it. I wouldn’t want to go back to T-bird ground clearance, but I don’t need two feet or whatever it is that I have now.

Last night I watched Robert Morris again. He did a sermon on faith. He says we should not have faith in things happening. I may be phrasing that wrong. Charismatics tend to venture into a practice called “name it and claim it,” in which they pray for things in the name of Jesus, state that they have them, and then wait for God to hand them over. I believe he was criticizing this.

He pointed out that we sometimes pray for things and believe we will receive them, only to be disappointed. That’s true. He said we should learn that we’re supposed to use our faith to bring us close to God. He pointed out that lots of faith-filled believers have been martyred and tortured and so on, and that they did not lose their faith. Surely they prayed to be spared. The point of a faith-filled life is not to make God do stuff for us. It’s to get close to him and know him and receive grace to submit to him and do his will. Bad things will happen to us, and it doesn’t mean we’re failures as Christians. If we have faith, God will make these things work out to our benefit, even if we don’t receive that benefit in this life. I think I’m summing it up fairly well. Maybe not.

Anyway, he said we often believe for things that are not God’s will, and that when we do that, we’re effectively exalting our will above his.

Here is where I come down on this. I think he’s absolutely right, as long as you don’t read anything extraneous into what he said.

Our lives are supposed to be victorious, but not without suffering. Even the two witnesses in the book of Revelation–extraordinarily powerful prophets–will be slaughtered. Many men of God have been tortured and killed. Paul was flogged over and over. Stephen was murdered by an angry mob. It only makes sense that the rest of us should sustain painful losses from time to time. On the other hand, I know for a fact that it’s often possible to claim something God has promised to you and to maintain your faith and receive it. This has happened to me; I was miraculously healed back in 1987, and I actually saw the guilty spirit leave my body. The 91st psalm says, “His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.” I believe this refers to standing on God’s promises.

I think the important thing to consider is whether you have any right to what you’re claiming. Don’t ask for things that will distance you from God. For some people, even ordinary, reasonable blessings like a steady job and a reliable car can be causes for forgetting the real source of prosperity. And you have to ask yourself whether there is anything in your life that will prevent you from receiving what you ask for. I think repentance and fasting and casting out spirits are very important. Paul said receiving communion in an unworthy manner could cause you to be sick or die; I think that shows what failure to repent can do.

I also think that a truly mature Christian is likely to receive warning when he faces adversity that God will not remove. The Jews in Babylon were told to build houses and get jobs, because they weren’t going home any time soon. Paul was told he would be imprisoned. Jesus knew he would be crucified. I believe Peter knew he would be executed, although I can’t say for sure he didn’t hear it from human beings. I suspect we are headed into an age where we are in closer touch with the Holy Spirit, and people will receive more information from him. There is a spiritual gift called the word of knowledge, in which God comes right out and tells you things. I think we’re going to see it operate more often in the future, as our knowledge and obedience increase. As persecution increases, I should add.

I hope I’m right or at least close to it.

To my knowledge, so far, I’ve experienced five of the gifts of the spirit. I can’t say I’ve experienced the word of knowledge, but Robert Morris says every gift is available to every believer. He says the idea that some people get this and other people get that is incorrect. If so, I suppose a word of knowledge will come if I ever need it. It would sure be nice to know better than to pray for things that aren’t going to happen.

Bigger Pantry Needed

I guess people get tired of reading things like this about the food I make, but…the sweet pickles I made turned out to be the best I’ve ever had. Even better than my grandmother’s. I can’t believe pickles can be this good. After a day in the fridge, the salt and seasonings did their thing, and the result was magnificent. Now I’m worried about having these things around. Dills are virtually calorie-free, but sweet pickles are loaded with sugar. I was miraculously delivered from gluttony back in August, but that doesn’t mean I need to tempt myself.

I’d post the recipe, but it came from a cookbook, so you ought to just get the book. Besides, I’m sure there are a million similar recipes on the web. I omitted the onions from the book receipe, and I used white sugar instead of brown. Other than that, it’s exactly what you’ll find in Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken.

Church was amazing last night, and this morning, I got a startling answer to prayer. Unfortunately, I can’t describe it in any detail, because it involves another person’s private business. All I can say is this: when you know someone whose behavior is atrocious, and you want to change it, fasting and prayer will give you surprising results. People have free will; no doubt about it. But that doesn’t mean God won’t work his persuasive powers on them. Besides, some bad behavior is due to demonic oppression, and your fasting can clear that up in another person.

This morning it occurred to me that I should always attack problems spiritually before acting in my own strength. I can’t say all problems are rooted in spiritual causes, although maybe they are. I can say that all problems should be attacked via spiritual warfare before we step in and screw things up with our blind bumbling. I think maybe this was what Jesus was getting at when he talked about turning the other cheek and so on. It wasn’t so much that it’s good to be a loser. His point, I think, was that your first response to hostility or adversity should be spiritual, not fleshly. Maybe I’m wrong. Either God put this stuff in my head, or it’s wrong, and I came up with it myself.

Last night at church, I told my pastor and one other person that things are going so well for me now that I don’t have any real problems. I have relatively trivial difficulties, but nothing major. I said that these days, it’s the people around me who have problems. They’re the ones I think I need to apply the bulk of my energy to. I may have sounded arrogant when I said all that. I certainly hope not; I was trying to comment on God’s goodness to me.

Here’s a funny thing about Christianity. When you talk about the great things God is doing for you, other people may take it as boasting. We’re all trying to get our lives sorted out and walk in blessings, so when someone else does well, it may seem like that person thinks he’s a better Christian than you. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m just saying…this stuff is WORKING.

The Psalms say, “My soul shall make her boast in the Lord. The humble [or 'needy'] shall hear thereof and be glad.” That seems to indicate the intelligent and constructive way to receive another person’s good news. If someone else gets something good, the smart thing is to try to find out what they did right.

I guess I was wrong to get up and do the Church Lady Superior Dance during the altar call. That, I regret.

I forgive the lady who sacked me and sat on me until the ushers arrived with the wheelbarrow. I wish I knew her name so I could return her weave. I probably shouldn’t be using it to dust my CD collection.

One of the funny problems I have right now is that my weight loss has made my skin break out. The weight loss has irritated my gall bladder, and the end result is slight skin problems. I guess I can live with that. It’s not like I have leprosy. Fifteen or twenty pounds from now, the weight loss should stop, and then I’ll be at equilibrium, so the stress to my body should go away.

Gall bladders are catch-22 organs. If you get fat, you become susceptible to gall bladder trouble. If you lose weight, during the process, you’re likely to have gall bladder flare-ups. Your gall bladder wants you to stay fat so it never gets well. Presumably, when I’m no longer fat or losing weight, I’ll be just fine.

I started taking a disgusting daily tonic of lime juice, olive oil, and oil of oregano, and I feel a whole lot better. And it gives me a use for my gigantic supply of fresh limes. Oil of oregano is loaded with terpenes, which are supposed to be hard on gallstones. It amazes me that medical science has absolutely no effective treatment for gall bladder disease. They know virtually nothing about preventing it. They don’t even try. I guess jerking gall bladders out at $5000 a pop is just too easy. Medical science has decided God made a mistake when he gave us gall bladders. They used to feel the same way about tonsils and appendices, but that’s changing. Bodies are like cars. I trust the engineers who design cars more than a slackjawed mechanic who tries to fix them.

More Peppers

Today I went to a meeting at church. On Saturday, one of the volunteer leaders invited me. I didn’t know what it was about, but I enjoy this sort of thing, and my morning was free, so off I went.

It was a meeting of the church’s leaders. If I understand things correctly, they have a practice of meeting on Mondays, and now they’re extending invitations to people who aren’t paid employees. I may have that wrong, but I think it’s about right.

I was relieved to see that they’re trying to communicate with people and organize them. I always complain about Christians using the Holy Spirit as a parachute. Don’t plan; don’t think. Just jump, and when you get in trouble, count on God to pull you out. The church is working to put together a hierarchy of volunteers with defined responsibilities, and it ought to make things run smoother.

On the way home, I picked up a copy of God’s Armorbearer by Terry Nance. This book was recommended to me when I indicated an interest in getting into the inner circle. I also got a copy of The Torah Blessing by Larry Huch. It’s full of stuff connecting Judaism and Christianity. I go through Christian books fast, so I figured one book was not enough.

Right now I’m canning Trinidad Scorpions in lime juice. What will I do with them once they’re canned? Danged if I know. But I canned those suckers. Oh, yes. They are canned. They’re not going ANYWHERE.

I want to dry apples so I can have dried-apple pies at Christmas. Is that too much to ask from life? I think not. But I don’t know how to go about drying them. If I had a junk car, I could dry them inside it, like my aunt used to do. I hate to spring for a dehydrator, but I probably will. It would give me a use for the tons of papayas I grow. Fresh, they’re not so hot. Dried, they’re excellent.

Tiny Jars of Magma

Okay, I have canned. Maybe.

I filled four half-pint jars with various peppers. I was going to use water and salt instead of vinegar, but I decided to use lime juice. I have so much. Why not use it? It doesn’t jar recipes the way vinegar does.

This pressure cooker is not easy to regulate. Apparently you have to twiddle the stove knob and find just the right position to get the pressure you want. This is not easy. It’s like steering a freighter. It takes a long time to respond, so you tend to over-correct. The canner spent a good deal of time at 14 psi, and then it spend some time at 9. The goal was 11, which I reached for most of the process.

There are things I don’t get. Headspace, for example. What happens if you screw up the headspace? I tried to leave an inch above the peppers, as per the recipe, but peppers stick up sometimes.

What’s the deal with air bubbles? The whole top of the jars were full of air. I’m not sure why I care whether there are bubbles elsewhere. I am trying to find out.

I didn’t can any Trinidad Scorpions. I realized half-pint jars are pathetic for peppers. You can get like eight of them in one jar. I’m going to use pints for the Scorpions. I figure I can put up at least two pints. What I’ll do with them, I can’t say. It might be fun to can them in pineapple juice instead of water or lime juice or vinegar. I don’t know what color the resulting deal will be, however.

I’m going to cool the jars down and see how they look. In a day or two I’ll open one to see what the peppers are like.

I have to make pork sausage! I have to. Surely you can understand that. And pickled beans. And pickles.

Maybe in a month or two, I’ll look into food dehydration.

No Biscuit Today

I love my weekly McDonald’s breakfast. I got in the habit back when I observed “fat day.” I limited my calories during the week, and then on the weekends, or just Saturday, I ate whatever I wanted. You can lose weight this way, but if you’re not careful, one day of gluttony can overcome six days of starvation, and you’ll add fat.

I don’t do fat day any more, but I still like to have my Mickey D’s on Saturday morning. My yankee uncle taught me that ketchup and eggs go together, and when I eat McMuffins and McDonald’s biscuits, I dip them in ketchup, and it’s heavenly. The rest of the week, I eat senior citizen fiber cereal, to avoid becoming a colonic casualty. Cereal is okay, but it’s not exciting.

Today I decided not to go to McDonald’s. Just because I had the power to say no. God delivered me from gluttony, and I’ve lost a lot of weight, but I’ve eaten a little more than I should on Saturdays, and I’m afraid I may have plateaued. I’m not having that. I want to lose thirteen more pounds. For the first time in my life, I have complete control over what I eat and drink, so I’m flexing my muscles and saying no.

I feel like I’m showing off, spiritually. Not to you, but to myself. It’s almost a snotty thing to do. I’m confident there are little beings assigned to me to make me overeat, and this is my way of shouting, “In your FACE.” I would rather enjoy that than have the food. Yesterday my sister said she wanted to get ahold of a demon some day so she could beat the tar out of it. What Christian hasn’t felt that way? I wish I could pummel one, too, but for now, I am enjoying frustrating them by not gorging.

I don’t care if I ever have another McMuffin. I suspect I will. I think you can bet on that. But if I don’t, I do not care. God has made McMuffins my McFootstool. I got something better than McMuffins.

Which is really saying something.

I picked up some canning equipment yesterday. It was either that or throw out a great number of hot peppers. I’m going to try to can them today. When you can stuff, you can do it at 212° for acidic foods or 245° for non-acidic foods. Acid keeps botulism down; if you don’t have acid, you need high temperatures to kill the spores. I don’t want to put vinegar in all my peppers, because it will affect the flavor when I use them in food. That means 245°, so I’ll have to use a pressure cooker.

I already had a pressure cooker, but it’s an expensive Magefesa with a small bottom. Not great for canning. I picked up a much cheaper Presto yesterday. I doubt it will get as hot as the Magefesa, but it will be fine for canning.

It amazes me that I found this stuff locally. No one cans in Miami. Everyone in Kentucky does it. There are some foods you pretty much have to can for yourself, if you want to have them at all. Pickled beans. Canned pork sausage (way better than it sounds). Sweet pickles that beat the daylights out of store brands. My grandmother and aunt and lots of other female relatives canned stuff. Some men up there can, too. Women aren’t the only ones who like food. Anyway, canning supplies would be easy to find anywhere in rural Appalachia, but finding them in Miami…that’s shocking.

The place I went to is called Goodman’s. I found it on Ebay, and I noticed they were in Miami, so I saw no point in doing mail-order. They were very helpful. The girl who took my order even carried my jars to the truck!

I think I’m supposed to get a special chemical to keep stuff crisp. Calcium chloride or something. Other than that, I’m all set.

My dad and my sister will be all excited. They miss home-canned stuff as much as I do. I can’t wait to try my hand at sausage. I loved that stuff. I thought I’d never see it again.

The jars are insanely expensive. I suppose intelligent people amass collections and take good care of them. I got 24 half-pints and 12 pints. I don’t think quarts are practical for me. Maybe if I start making tomato juice. If I could find ripe tomatoes, I could make incredible tomato sauce. Maybe I can use grape tomatoes. They’re fantastic, and they’re fairly cheap at Costco. Cheap enough to justify the effort.

I got a couple of pepper recipes. We’ll see how it goes. If it works out, beans and sausage and pickles won’t be far behind.

Local Find!

I can’t believe this.

1. I turned on my DVR’d Robert Morris show from yesterday, and it was all about grace. Same thing I wrote about today. He even mentioned Abraham, the same way I did.

2. I looked for canning supplies on Ebay, and I found a store…FIVE MILES AWAY.

Canning supplies? In Miami?

Amazing.

Reaping

I got a nice email from Robert Morris. I used their contact info to send a message saying how much I had enjoyed and agreed with his work, and he emailed me personally and said this blog post (I had sent him a link) was “great.”

That was a good outcome. He didn’t call me a heretic or anything.

I’m reading his book on the power of words right now. Very sobering stuff. Things like gossiping, complaining, and criticizing can cause real problems for us. When you do these things, it’s like planting poison ivy in your yard. Problems arise later. If I can’t gossip, complain, or criticize, it almost amounts to a total ban on communication. I might actually forget how to write and talk.

He also noted that James advised us not to become teachers. The problem is that God holds teachers to higher standards. This is disturbing. I try to write about my testimony all the time, but it’s nearly impossible not to veer into amateur teaching.

Please forget everything I have ever written.

I don’t know if that will get me off the hook. It was worth a shot!

I keep thinking about fat Christians. I was afraid that I would come off like a judgmental kook, saying obese people are under bondage, and that where one bondage exists, others may be present, and that this might be a good reason to avoid accepting teaching from fat preachers. But the more I think about it, the more I think it’s right.

Addiction isn’t physical. It’s a mental illness. A cigarette smoker will say things that are just as crazy as the nonsense that comes out of moderately messed up mental patients. “The studies don’t prove anything.” “Some people can smoke forever and never get sick.” “I can’t quit until I get through this stressful problem I’m dealing with.” This stuff is pure idiocy. Fat people say, “I know how to lose weight. I just don’t do it.” “All men put on muscle after they hit thirty.” “I have big bones.” The dumbest thing they say is, “I’m on a diet.” If you’re on a diet, obviously, it’s a temporary solution. Fat is a permanent problem. Temporary can’t defeat permanent. You don’t need a diet. You need to not be a fat person any more. You need to have the fat person drive removed.

If food can make you think stupid things about food, who is to say something else isn’t making you think and say stupid things about religion?

So I am still leery of obese preachers.

Today I was watering my plants, and I realized I had to harvest some more peppers whether I wanted to or not. Here is the result.

The big ones are limes, obviously. The branches are from my gigantic prig ki nu bush, which I had to trim to save the habanero gold bush.

Here’s how it goes, in clockwise fashion. Yellow peppers: yellow habaneros. Next, habanero golds (hot, sweet, and delicious). Then Trinidad Scorpions. Then Tobago Seasoning peppers. Then assorted Home Depot cayennes and habaneros grown from seeds taken from Publix peppers. I didn’t harvest any prig ki nus other than the ones still stuck to the branches. There are a couple of Fatalii peppers in among the limes.

I throw limes out these days. I can’t keep up with the tree. The limes get ripe and start to rot before I notice them.

Is this the law of sowing and reaping, at work? Dunno. I gave the church offerings of every pepper you see here except for fataliis and Publix peppers. I gave limes, too. And here I am, with this pile of produce. My banana trees have two bunches on them, and a third just started growing. One of my plantain trees now has a bract starting. My nam wa banana trees aren’t fruiting, but the biggest one now touches a power line, and it has lots of pups.

Here’s news that will make a tingle run up your leg. I’m giving the church pork chops! Long story, but I have eight pounds of frozen pork chops I need to get rid of before they get freezer burn. If giving the church peppers helps my pepper harvest, and giving the church limes helps my lime harvest, what will happen if I give them pork? Paradise, I suppose. Yards and yards of country hams, ham hocks, lechons, and maybe even Slim Jims.

I’m not saying it works that way, but I do have a whole lot of peppers.

I’m trying to give a considerable number of these peppers away. If I can’t do that, I have to freeze them or something. Or–hey!–time to start canning! Oh, man. That would be just sick. Power tools, a big truck, guns, frozen Costco prime beef, and to top it off, jars and jars of marvelous exotic canned peppers.

But for now I just need to get these things off the table.

Sleeper Cell?

I had such an astounding day yesterday, it’s almost pointless to try to write about it.

The day began very well; I attended to some nagging responsibilities. With that off my back, I went to a meeting with a lady from the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews. I gave them a little money, and their representative was in the area, so she called and asked to meet with me. I caught up with her at Starbucks.

I didn’t really want to meet with her. I don’t understand why charities have reps who run around talking to donors. If you give a charity money, presumably you don’t want anything from them, so why would they need to come see you? I figured the idea was to butter people up and hit them for more cash, which is sort of pointless in my case, since I only give when I felt led by God.

It turned out I was completely wrong. This lady is a Christian (like the overwhelming majority of donors). She attends a Christian church and a Messianic synagogue. And she’s very much on the same frequency I’m on, politically and spiritually.

She confirmed some of the strange things I’ve observed. She deals with lots of charismatics, and I’ve observed that they seem to be developing a lot of interest in things like tools, farming, storing food, and shooting. She told me about other people who are experiencing the same drives. Here’s something amazing. You know how I write about wanting to move to Central Florida and have a compound? Mike and I talk about how great it would be to have places near each other, complete with shooting facilities. Well, this lady knows two retired female missionaries who just inherited a cattle ranch in Florida. And if I understood her correctly, it has a gun range. Is that crazy or what?

She told me about the people who give to the IFCJ to help poor Jews. It’s not all rich people with piles of disposable income. She said she met with a lady who donated $30,000 at one whack. That lady lives in a trailer park. She said she just didn’t need the money. Donors say God leads them to do this, so they do it. And they’re thrilled to hand it over. No strings. Not even proselytizing.

This is real. God is up to something. The government is becoming increasingly hostile to Christians, Christianity, Jews, and Israel, and God is getting us ready for it. Maybe our government can be turned around through prayer. Maybe it can’t. But individuals can be part of the solution, and they can be blessed within the chaos and ruin.

Last night I started watching a new Robert Morris DVD. He mentioned Ezekiel 14. Here is the pertinent part:

13 Son of man, when the land sinneth against me by trespassing grievously, then will I stretch out mine hand upon it, and will break the staff of the bread thereof, and will send famine upon it, and will cut off man and beast from it:

14 Though these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job, were in it, they should deliver but their own souls by their righteousness, saith the Lord GOD.

15 If I cause noisome beasts to pass through the land, and they spoil it, so that it be desolate, that no man may pass through because of the beasts:

16 Though these three men were in it, as I live, saith the Lord GOD, they shall deliver neither sons nor daughters; they only shall be delivered, but the land shall be desolate.

Ezekiel spoke of Israel, but the principle seems applicable to the US. When we turn on the Jews and God, our land brings curses on itself, but each of us can be spared if we are not part of the rebellion. It seems like many Christians are being set up to survive a future judgment. Psalm 37 says:

The Lord knoweth the days of the upright, and their inheritance shall be forever. They shall not be ashamed in the evil time, and in the days of famine, they shall be satisfied. But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the Lord shall be as the fat of lambs. They shall consume. Into smoke shall they consume away.

Then of course, there is the story of Lot. His wife and daughters died in the destruction of Sodom.

I thought talking to this lady would be a drag, but the meeting probably lasted an hour, and I really enjoyed it. It reminded me that God is the ultimate grassroots organizer. He organizes people who don’t even know they’re being organized. I am part of something. I’m not just an eccentric kook with weird ideas. I’m more than that. Although the shoe does fit.

Almost as soon I got home from the meeting, I had to get on the road to TBN’s studio in Hollywood, where my pastor hosted Praise the Lord last night. Yesterday was kind of a breakthrough day for me, and for some reason, I felt like going to the taping was the thing to do. It was the churchgoer’s equivalent of going to a strip club for a drunken blowout.

I had a tough time finding the studio. There’s a big TBN sign next to I-95, nowhere near the facility. Go figure. West of 95, there’s a big building beside the road with “TBN Ministries” on the sign. Crazy me…I thought that might be it. But I pulled the Diesel Death Star into the parking lot and checked, and the place was deserted. Then I noticed the giant antenna nearby, and I realized it was in the middle of a huge trailer park. “Trinity Village,” or some such. I’m not kidding. The studio is in the middle of a trailer park. God-haters could have a real field day with that.

I went into the park and found the studio, and there were so many cars there, I had to park the Death Star on the grass.

The studio is maybe fifty by a hundred. The chairs…not good. When they said the taping would go two hours, I was worried. It would be like sitting in an airline seat for two hours, with the back completely upright. I can’t stand that. All my weight is in the top third of my body. I have to lean back. But when you’re a saintly person like me, you don’t complain about how awful chairs make your back hurt. I’m just not built that way. Stoicism and martyrdom are my bag.

The show was fantastic. Pastor Rich started with a local megachurch pastor, and then he interviewed an old friend of his who had written a book. They were hilarious together. Then Keith Craft showed up; if you haven’t seen him, you’re really missing out. He’s an extremely gifted speaker. Funny as he can be. Then John Gray came out; I was looking forward to seeing him again after meeting him and driving him around at our church’s “Girlfriends” conference. Once he opened his mouth, there was no stopping him. The creativity and the Spirit kept good things pouring out of him until the end of the show. I was laughing out loud, and so was everyone else. The church is having a men’s encounter thing in November, and I think he’ll be there. I’m already signed up.

Robert Morris says the gift of prophecy refers to encouragement and exhortation. Not correction. Not predicting the future. If that’s the case, John Gray is loaded with it. Although he also predicts the future sometimes.

I thought about the last time I visited the studio. I had been there before, but it had been so long ago, I had forgotten about the trailers. The last time I visited–the only time–was in 1997, the week my mother died from lung cancer. My aunt and I drove up there to donate my mother’s clothes to charity. The family didn’t want them around. They were a sharp reminder of our loss. How different yesterday’s visit was. The first time I went there, I was fresh from a terrible defeat. This time, I went in victory.

I can’t fit the whole day into a blog post. It was tremendous, but it was just too rich to capture in a few words.

I feel like going to the range this week. I need to crank up the Death Star, throw some really offensive weapons into the bed, and bust a few laser-aimed caps.

Ha. The IFCJ lady just called. Left her Palm Pilot at Starbucks. I hope Janet Napolitano didn’t find it. Say a prayer!

More

Prayer answered.

Try Bacteria

I took a bunch of Tobago seasoning peppers, pureed them, stirred in a spoonful of yogurt and a little pressed garlic, and put the mixture in a container on the kitchen counter. A smart person would have nuked them first to kill whatever exotic bacteria were clinging to them, but you know me. I smirk at death.

After a week or two of fermenting, they smelled fantastic. But I couldn’t figure out what to do with them. Today I plopped a load of this stuff on a sub, and it was fantastic. Much better than banana peppers.

I didn’t make this idea up. They do it in the islands. Some people leave it in the sun to rot.

It would be even better with Home Depot cayenne peppers.

Give it a shot.